A Rabbit's Review 7/5/2012

A Rabbit's Review

By LisaMary Wichowski

Graceland Cemetery: A Design History

Christopher Vernon

Univ. of Massachusetts Press (January 1, 2012)

39.95

ISBN-10: 1558499261

ISBN-13: 978-1558499263

The trustees of the Graceland Improvement Fund and the Library of American Landscape History to support, and celebrate the renovations occurring there since 1991 commissioned Christopher Vernon’s new Graceland Cemetery.  Much of the book is dedicated to an intellectual history of the men who worked with, against, and over each other to create what the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 called “the most perfect expression [of the] modern cemetery.”

Mount Auburn, Laurel Hill, and Spring Grove are not only places to find historical persons but reflective of the cities own social and economic history.  Graceland in Chicago fits well in this cohort of  “rural cemeteries” (with “rural” originally meaning not just a location, but a sense of gentility).  Graceland is different in one crucial way, however, Cambridge, Philadelphia and Cincinnati were all well-established, respectable cities when the founders of these internment grounds began.  Chicago was still an onion-scented mudhole when in 1860 the first plans for Graceland were made.

Vernon rightly points out that in early Chicago, aesthetic virtues were shunted off to the margins in pursuit of profit.  This is why, unlike its predecessor  “rural” cemeteries, Graceland was from its inception a for profit enterprise.   The profits indeed happened and Chicago developed a class of men intent on leaving a legacy by way of creating civilizing institutions.  One of these men was Thomas Barbour Bryan, a transplanted Virginia lawyer who attained financial success in Chicago banking and real estate.  Bryan was a devotee of landscape gardening and was able to correspond with and hire the leading lights of his day to design his properties outside of Chicago.  His network soon brought him into contact with William Saunders, the landscape gardener of the new Rosehill Cemetery being planned a few miles west of Bryan’s home. 

Bryan had combined some land he already owned with a purchase from his neighbor George Healy and by April of 1860 had made headway in the opening of a business, if you can call an advertisement a beginning.  By late June there was a board of directors and even roads, the design by the commissioned Saunders would arrive soon.  It is unfortunate that no copy of the original site plan still exists, as with many things it was lost in the Great Fire.  Vernon does show a singed copy of a lithograph that shows carriage roads and footpaths, their curves contrasting greatly with the severe grid pattern of Chicago’s streets then and now.

Burials begun, work and expansion continued through the Civil War adding many internments of soldiers as well as reburials from Chicago’s old City Cemetery, which was being converted into what is now Lincoln Park.  By the late 1860s Graceland was an expanding business and had hired a new, quite eminent landscape gardener to manage and incorporate the new additions.  Horace Cleveland was influenced by the design of Cincinnati’s Spring Grove cemetery, a lawn plan, with more open expanses, as compared to the, by then passé,  “rural” model of Mount Auburn.

The final land acquisitions for the cemetery would take place in 1879, by then management had passed from Bryan to his nephew Bryan Lathrop and creative control to William LeBaron Jenney, the architect of Chicago’s the first skyscraper.  Jenney was a master technician; his first task at Graceland to rework the drainage, his greatest impact on the landscape Lake Willowmere, a water feature planned by all of his predecessors, but never fully realized.

The way Vernon focuses on the design sensibilities and theories of the principals is enlightening.  The evolution of Graceland under each succeeding generation of designer makes a good case study for other cemeteries experiencing a decline and renewal.  Not every place has the famous names that Graceland did, but most are products of the vision of more than one person.  Any attempts at restoration must be conscious of all the preceding visions and make a conscious choice which to follow.

The epilogue of the book is what makes it useful to fans of cemeteries rather than keeping it in the realm of Chicago history or design history.  This final chapter concerns the built environment within Graceland.  The Holabird & Roche designed chapel is discussed within its physical context, as are Sullivan’s Ryerson and Getty tombs and McKim, Mead and White’s Palmer monument.    Vernon’s book helps to understand the context of the design choices of the whole of Graceland, landscape and architecture.

This is not a book I’d use to introduce someone to Graceland, that honor still goes to Barbara Lanctot’s A Walk Through Graceland Cemetery.  This book is instead for when you’ve returned home and are processing how the landscape functions as a cemetery and as a tribute to Chicago and the Midwest.  When you return, you’ll appreciate what you see all the more.